A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 2

A screenshot of TurtleIsland.social Media Mode courtesy of @dillyd@turtleIsland.social

Continued from:
A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 1

Boring but super important technical details

TurtleIsland.social runs on plain vanilla Mastodon, the most stable and widely supported kind. We also use professionally managed hosting. Together, these mean developer level support. TurtleIsland.social may be a small community but we are part of a large block of Mastodon instances that receive very adequate attention. Software updates including important security patches are applied within a few hours of release and seamlessly (no downtime). Our uptime is as good as it gets. Configuration files, media and database storage are backed up daily to a remote secure object storage (again no downtime). Content is enterprise-level safe.

Not all Mastodon instances can make the technical superiority claims that we make. And Bluesky, with its multi-million dollar setup and information technology team, has nothing on us. TurtleIsland.social is equal to or (most likely) better than any enterprise level social media. As a retired IT professional, it is very important to me that TurtleIsland.social runs grief-free and without technical excitement. I like to sleep during sleep hours…

Similar but different

Both TurtleIsland.social and Bluesky are Twitter-type clones. The basic look and operation are very similar.

TurtleIsland.social posts allow up to 500 characters and unlimited live editing though. Bluesky posts allow up to 300 characters and no live editing. In actual use, these two facets make for an improved experience on TurtleIsland.social. 500 characters makes a huge difference in the amount of multi-post messages as well as the content quality of your posts. Editing fixes a lot of typos and stops a lot of reposting for typos or updates.

Better, more accurate posts equals more engagement and less misunderstanding.

On the other hand, an organization that needs to post content on both platforms will find it easy to cut and paste content from Bluesky to TurtleIsland.social. The reverse however, may not fit into Bluesky without breaking your post into two posts.

Media mode is great for artists

The media tab on Bluesky filters out posts with no media, that’s it. On TurtleIsland.social, the media tab also filters out posts with no media, but additionally goes into an Instagram-like grid mode (see header image above), which is very cool. I even have a 2nd TurtleIsland.social account geared just for media mode to replace Instagram.

Happy days… this is a real strong point for artists, photographers or anyone that wants a portfolio of their work. My hope is that Mastodon continues to improve media mode, which is already great.

As a side note, the Fediverse Instagram clone which shall remain nameless, pretty much sucks, especially from an independent server perspective, so I was very glad to discover this.

Direct Messages

In my opinion Mastodon Private Mentions (Chat) kind of suck. On Bluesky, Chat is a separate function, pretty easy and clear. On Mastodon, Private Mentions are part of the regular post function with a private flag that is easy to forget and accidentally produce a public post (eek!). Personally, I would suggest Signal over either private message function anyways, but for small communications on Mastodon, just be careful. It usually takes one kablooey to learn your lesson, ha!

Federation differences

As I mentioned in Part 1, TurtleIsland.social is part of a federation of ‘over 8000 Mastodon instances. Billionaire corporate independence is a reality today’. There is a rich variety of privately owned Mastodon instances of all types of communities that TurtleIsland.social is federated with today. Not only is Mastodon federation mature and problem free, but the cost of entry is relatively low and within reach of small groups, thus enabling unique communities like TurtleIsland.social to exist and thrive.

Technically, Bluesky is federated (to a proprietary standard), but the feature is unimplemented. The design is such that cost of entry is high, requiring expensive servers, centralized connection/resources, and major technical expertise.

Bluesky is centralized and susceptible to billionaire takeover

Regardless of the Bluesky ‘billionaire-proof’ lie, it is very susceptible to being forced by the fascist Trump administration to be MAGA friendly. Bluesky is also a prime candidate for a billionaire buyout. In fact, the more successful Bluesky is, the more likely it is that it will be bought out and/or forced to be MAGA friendly.

I hate to say it but it is sad to see people joyfully breaking free from Elon Musk and his X disaster, or Meta and their nonsense, to only be setting themselves up as prime targets for another digital refugee situation.

Again, fortunately, TurtleIsland.social servers are in France. Mastodon servers are privately owned, there are far too many of them to centrally control. Even if the Mastodon flagship sold its soul (which is very unlikely) the Fediverse network itself is an embraced standard (unlike the proprietary Bluesky standard) and the open source servers (with low cost of entry) would continue on. And of course, Mastodon has account portability, so you can move your account to any one of the more than 8000+ instances.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

This link will become live when Part 3 (The best parts, culture and security!) is released shortly:
A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 3

Please check back. Mvto!

A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 1

Both have pros and cons, let’s start with background

For background, most people reading this understand that X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (Instagram and Facebook) are owned by slimeball MAGA billionaires and are very disrespectful to BIPOC and left of center people. I’m not going to expound on that.

That said, for many it is difficult to disengage from X and Meta for a variety of reasons. Primarily BIPOC communities, institutions and brands. Institutions ranging from government to brands to entertainment stars, etc. are deeply embedded in commercial social media.

For me, Facebook is hard to ditch. As an off the rez urban Native, it is a primary information connection to my Native Nation and its resources, and other important Indian country tribal information. Many Native people, especially creatives are deeply connected to Instagram. X as disgusting as it is, is still the go to place for at this moment news and official government information etc.

BIPOC communities can be significant on all those platforms. Many Native people and organizations have thousands and thousands of followers. In most cases, those followers are not just numbers but real important community members. There are many personal and business relationships that you just don’t throw away without pain, or even total destruction.

TurtleIsland.social is born

In my mind, October 27, 2022 was the seminal moment, when Elon Musk bought Twitter. Within a week or so, in November of 2022, my favorite relative Tzipporah and I joined a Mastodon instance. Within a month, we decided to operate our own instance and on December 5, 2022, what was to become TurtleIsland.social was alive. A short stint as Mvskoke.social was too narrowly focused we decided. We switched to Woodpecker.social which was great, but even though woodpeckers were important medicine birds to us, it didn’t ring out as a Native Indigenous instance to others, so on July 19, 2023 the final configuration of TurtleIsland.social opened. This has been super, and won’t change.

On September 10, 2023, TurtleIsland.social moved to managed hosting, a huge step forward in reliability, performance and expandability. This also freed up a lot of my time allowing me to concentrate more on building community instead of system administration. The upshot was now we had the best possible Mastodon instance. We were ready for high demand or celebrity users. The sky was the limit for Native owned and operated social media.

The most important facts here: TurtleIsland.social is a Native owned and operated Mastodon instance. Beyond that, there are already over 8000 Mastodon instances. Billionaire corporate independence is a reality today.

Bluesky is born

There has been a lot written about this that I won’t duplicate, but Bluesky opened registrations to the general public on February 6, 2024, a year after its release as an invite-required beta. I think everyone knows that Bluesky came from the belly of Twitter, and is a traditional billionaire owned tech company. All the typical billionaire social media risks apply to Bluesky. In standard corporate baloney fashion, Bluesky touts itself as “billionaire-proof”, but real hurdles to this imaginary freedom exist. Especially for BIPOC people, the cost for entry is too high. It is not realistic to fork off from Bluesky. But for now, Bluesky is left of center leaning and friendly to BIPOC people.

The most important facts here: Bluesky is a centralized platform, meaning it is owned and operated by a single billionaire drenched entity. The imagined “billionaire-proof” freedom Bluesky touts is a pipe dream.

TurtleIsland.social and Bluesky provide new ways forward

At this point in time, I consider both TurtleIsland.social and Bluesky to be essential for Native/Indigenous social media experiences. Ordinarily I try to think forward 7 generations, but I don’t think any specific social media will last that long. However I do think it is worthwhile to consider what will happen over the next 10 or 20 years. Seriously, today there is a lot of pressure on social media and all forms of news and information to succumb not only to billionaire whims, but to a quickly degrading fascist US government as well.

Fortunately, TurtleIsland.social servers are in France.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

Continued:
A Native perspective: TurtleIsland.social vs. Bluesky Part 2